Election day: A long, expensive race to lead L.A. draws to an end

After all the campaigning and debating by the candidates, voters cast their ballots for the next mayor of Los Angeles on Tuesday. City residents also voted for other city officials and on ballot measures.

Michael Finnegan and Seema Mehta

After years of campaigning, and months of debating and handshaking by the candidates, the time is finally upon Los Angeles voters to choose their next mayor.

Polls are set to open at 7 a.m. for an election that that has drawn record spending and will see either the first woman or the first Jew elected as the city's mayor.

Despite those milestones, both candidates have tried to turn around what could be record-low voter turnout with campaigning in the final days and hours.

A recent USC Price/Los Angeles Times poll showed Eric Garcetti's lead in the race has narrowed to 7 percentage points, but his strength among conservatives has blocked rival Wendy Greuel from securing a San Fernando Valley base that is vital to her chances.

As the candidates and their partisans swarmed across the city in advance of Tuesday's runoff election, Garcetti, a city councilman from Silver Lake, held a 48%-to-41% lead, the survey found. Voters in the Valley and every other key region of Los Angeles favored him over Greuel, the city controller.

The election will sweep in new leadership for Los Angeles' 3.8 million residents, but the race is likely to be decided by an older, whiter and more educated fraction of the city's population.

Latinos, the city's dominant ethnic group and a key voting bloc, make up 44% of the city's population, U.S. census figures show. But the USC Price/Times poll suggests that Latinos will make up 24% of those who cast ballots Tuesday, in part because many are immigrants who are ineligible to vote.

Non-Latino whites, by contrast, at 32% of the city's population, are likely to total 51% of the vote, giving them an outsized role in choosing the next mayor, according to the poll.

Apathy among young people could diminish their clout too. Of the city's voting-age population, 65% are under 50. But only 37% of those likely to vote are under 50.

Because of the city’s voting-by-mail procedures, there’s a chance Angelenos may not know who will be the next mayor for days or weeks.